Linked by David Adams on Wed 14th Jul 2010 21:28 UTC, submitted by No Body

Microsoft originally said that new owners of Windows 7 who wanted to downgrade to XP would only have until 2011 to do so, but now the company has changed its mind and extended support for the old operating system until 2020.

Many industrial control applications, or older appliances rely on ancient operating environments. Given many does not even have any source code left, it's better to support the old OS for this minority.

And I believe MS would be fine, as long as people continue to pay for support contracts.

However, desktops are different beasts, though. MS probably wants to kill XP support on end user computers "yesterday".